[ExI] Clark abstract

[Lee Corbin]

Keith writes

>>In other words, it is people's feelings of altruism (towards the poor,
>>the sick, the backward, the disenfranchised, etc.) which is the
>>evolutionary mechanism responsible. I won't go over the evolutionary
>>explanations of altruism here---one may see any number of books
>>and articles, from "Origin of Virtues" on down to "The Mating Mind".
> 
> It's possible.  Ghod knows what interacting with much larger numbers 
> of people including animated cartoons on TV and movies while growing 
> up has done to the calibration of our detectors of who is a tribal 
> relative and the normal recipient of altruistic behavior.

Well put.

>> > As a guess it's tapping the same psychological mechanisms as other
>> > political matters.
>>
>> I'd put it the other way:  many political matters rely on instinctual
>> feelings of altruism. Whenever any socialist wants more government
>> control of anything, for example, all he or she need do is exhibit
>> sufficiently gut-wrenching visual material (which, of course, shortcuts
>> rationality). Children suffering is one of the most common recourses.
> 
> Politics itself shortcuts rationality.  If anyone has not read Dr. 
> Westen's really fine fMRI research on partisan politics, they 
> should.  Anyone need a pointer or a .pdf?

Well, okay, political activity itself *does* often shortcut
rationality. But clearly not always.  Imagine, for example,
some extraordinarily rational people who back an
extraordinarily ronpaul rational candidate. Their strategies
and machinations must be described as political too.

> The investigators used functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to study a 
> sample of committed Democrats and Republicans during the three months 
> prior to the U.S. Presidential election of 2004. The Democrats and 
> Republicans were given a reasoning task in which they had to evaluate 
> threatening information about their own candidate. During the task, 
> the subjects underwent fMRI to see what parts of their brain were 
> active. What the researchers found was striking...

Of course, libertarians would not evince such brain behavior.

But seriously, *if* there did exist totally rational beings who wanted
nonetheless to win elections, their behavior would of course be
political on any usual meaning of the term.

>>Of course, this is *not* to say that we should ignore suffering---far
>>from it. But our conclusions should be based on a careful weighing
>>of costs and benefits, even statistics. It's better, for example, for a
>>very few children to starve to death than for millions to be destitute
>>and have no propects.  But to grok that last sentence, one needs to
>>really understand what "million" means, and most people, sadly,
>>don't have that ability in such a context.
> 
> Heck Lee, the way things are headed we are talking about multiple 
> *billions* dying within the next 20-30 years.  And you are right, we 
> were not evolved to deal with human numbers larger than a tribe.

It does seem much more probable that such a large catastrophe
of one kind or another is going to take us out, or most of us.

Hmm, but then, by now we should be used to that. For the
last two thousand years, Christians at least expected the end
any day now, and during the Cold War a lot of us went around
naturally assuming that Armageddon of a different kind was to
be expected at almost any moment.

Sigh, so what's new?

Lee